Bitch Empress
Catherine the Great. By E. M. Almedingen. (Hutchinson, 30s.) Catherine the Great. By E. M. Almedingen. (Hutchinson, 30s.)
THE image: of Catherine the Great which E M. Almedingen puts before us is a selective one, as any biographer's must be. She shows Catherine refracted from her own personality. Her selectiveness is not always for the best reasons, but her book has many qualities. She has certain special gifts. She is of Russian ex- traction herself, and has a detailed knowledge of Russian history. This is one of a series of biographies of some of the salient figures. It sets Catherine in her context, and shows her swept along by the main stream of Russian history, even while she temporarily_ directed its course. Because Miss Almedingen is also an able novelist, as a biographer she can convey a character or a setting imaginatively without falsifying them. This is not a deep or contro- versial study, but it contributes something to the subject. It is authentic and not unscholarly: it is based upon contemporary records, of which there are many for Catherine's reign, including Catherine's own memoirs. But it is also readable and interesting, and bridges the gap between the formal historical studies and the popular lives written for no better reason than that Catherine had so many lovers no one was ever able to count them.
It is a pity Miss Almedingen does not more often indulge her poetic sense of the
congruous. Her rather inflexible prose can be oddly evocative. She is at her best when she describes the impact of her new environment upon the immature but logical German princess, narrowly brought up, poor, and never having owned a gold piece of her own. Round her moved the stiff, brocaded figures of the Russian court, their motivation usually obscure, eating off gold plates in a setting where the chair legs were always falling off and the favourite sport was swatting flies. The furniture, in fact, was constantly being packed and unpacked because of the Empress Elizabeth's whim that wherever she visited she must be surrounded by the same things. Eventually, Elizabeth herself collapsed
like one of her own chairs,.in the church porch at Tsarkoe Selo. One seems to see her, like a broken doll, lying sprawled there amid much coming and going and praying of courtiers, until as an afterthought someone thought of sending for a doctor.
In Miss Almedingen's view, the bleak early years at court made Catherine what she was. She had no confidant, and developed an armoured personality. 'No opportunities for candour came her way.' She sees Catherine as a deeply lonely figure: lonely in her extensive, undirected reading, her prolific private writing, her distasteful marriage, and even in the famous gaiety, which, as she so strangely puts it. 'would have lent grandeur to a blighted cucumber bed.'
But the deepest loneliness was in Catherine's attempt to unite herself and her overpowering personal ambition with the destinY of Russia. Catherine developed a sense of identity with her adopted country which infuriated her Prussian- educated and Prussian-obsessed husband. - It became her guiding star. But Russia never really entered under her skin. A pagan at heart, she never understood the spirit of the Russian Orthodox religion. But also there was some- thing alien in her personality.-. A woman who regarded time as the most precious of raw materials and prided herself upon the meticu- lous use of every minute, she was set to govern a vast country 'where the national preoccupation with other-worldly themes inevitably dulled the zest for action in a normal three-dimensional world.'
Miss Almedingen is well equipped to under- stand .this. But she understands the Russia of this period better than she understands Catherine. She sees her as a paradox : 'abhorring despotism and loving power . . . sickened by servility and delighting in flattery.' She really means an enigma. Basically she is baffled by her. She believes her to have been amoral. but shows surprise at the absence of moral re- actions, and apologises for her in terms that have no relevance. She flatly admits that Peter ll was murdered at Ropsha and that responsibility rested with Catherine. 'That belongs to history, she says. But it worries her. 'Catherine could have. had no sense of personal loss. Remorse does not seem to have troubled her.' The tragic Ivan VI was also murdered with Cathenne's connivance. 'From a moral point of view,' says Miss Almedingen, 'she cannot entirely be acquitted.' And when she records how that curious pretender to the throne, the 'Princess Tarakanova,' was allowed to die in an under- ground cell, it is as if she s'ghed. 'The Empress's own share in the episode does not make pleasant reading.'
So, too, with Catherine's uncountable lovers. Miss Almedingen is honest about the facts, but falls away into inconsistency and excuse• Catherine objected to questionable jokes, she says. None of the European courts of the daY were mirrors of virtue. Her energies were so vast she could not have expended them in the orgies attributed to her in her day. This aspect of her life was even 'prosaic.' All her affaires were open, the gentlemen en litre being known to all.' What does that have to do with it? The gentlemen were there, and in numbers Cather- ine's lovers exceeded those of her predecessors. It is true that no one ever counted them. So what were these gentlemen for? And why were they so numerous? Let us hope that their func- tion was mainly political. But Miss Almedingen believes that Catherine dominated them en- tirely, even Potemkin, and that their political purpose was limited to administering her Own Policies. She remains vaguely puzzled, and begins to apply a moral yardstick, only to dis- miss it herself as irrelevant. 'To condemn would be all too easy. To approve would be fatuous. In Catherine's case neither approach seems to answer.'
In fact, Miss Almedingen finds her subject incompatible at the deeper personal level, and shies away from the cold-heartedness which lies at the centre of her own portrayal of Catherine. 'It used to be fashionable,' she says, `to argue that ambition and politics absorbed Catherine to the exclusion of all else, but the argument has about as much weight as a sparrow's feather.' Yet it seems basic to her own book. Because she does not wish to present Catherine as a monster she blurs the edges a little so that we might not notice if she were. Perhaps she was not. But what was she? This is a very interesting life of her, but it does not really answer that question.
STELLA RODWAY
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